Toward the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004), Joel and Clementine come to
learn that by falling in love they are about to repeat their
earlier relationship. When that relationship went sour, they
decided to literally erase each other from their memories. Now,
knowing but not actively remembering their shared, traumatic past,
they are confronted with a dilemma: should they avoid the risk of
retreading their own painful footsteps, or confront it head-on?
They choose the latter option, the film thus leaving its viewers
with a romantic union that is already stained by the seed of future
failure that is the repetition of a traumatic past. As Todd McGowan
argues in Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema,
through this unfolding Eternal Sunshine challenges the
structure of cinematic spectatorship: "In asking us to abandon the
new, [the film] asks us to forsake the dream of escaping the trauma
of the past. . . . It is only in embracing repetition that we can
escape being strangled by it" (109).

Eternal Sunshine is one of the films McGowan
considers exemplary of what he coins atemporal cinema:
a relatively new genre that is characterized by a narrative
structure that defies a linear chronology of events, and without
that the diegesis necessarily demands such temporal distortions.
According to McGowan, through its nonlinear narratives atemporal
cinema makes visible the traumatic loss foundational to the
subject. Whereas traditional, forward-moving narratives are ruled
by a logic of desire, atemporal cinema expresses the more
fundamental logic of the death drive, or simply the drive. Rather
than being oriented toward the successful attainment of the lost
object, the subject of the drive infinitely repeats the failed
encounter with that object, thus embracing loss. This repetition of
the drive is the collision between the temporal flow of biological
life and the synchronic social structure attempting to arrest this
flow. For the subject to accept his or her unacceptable loss and to
emerge as a subject of the drive is the very aim of psychoanalysis,
McGowan explains. Instead of buying into the lure of the
"ameliorative powers of time," as does the subject of desire, the
subject of the drive confronts the fact that biological life will
never be fully compatible with the order of the signifier: "For the
subject of the drive, time perpetuates its wounds rather than
healing them" (221). Atemporal cinema, in its movement away from
time and toward repetition, represents, McGowan argues, an "ethical
landmark" in the history of the medium: "One treats others and
oneself ethically only when one is out of time and contemporary
atemporal cinema works to place us in this position" (16).

As did The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
(2007), Out of Time interweaves expositions of
psychoanalytic theory and philosophy with close analysis. And as
did McGowan's earlier work, Out of Time does so in
lucid, admirably accessible prose. The introduction is followed by
eight chapters, each of which centers around a film representing a
specific dimension of atemporal cinema. The order of the chapters
represents an "increasing investment in the embrace of trauma"
(34). So the book moves from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
(1994), which stands at the border between traditional and
atemporal cinema, to Irréversible/
Irreversible (dir. Gaspar Noé, 2002), which makes the
immediacy of trauma felt in such a poignant way that "it is almost
impossible to imagine teaching the film in a college classroom"
(207). (And for those willing to take up this challenge I would
recommend doing so in conjunction with this chapter, as the text's
astute analysis of Noé's shocking visualization of trauma,
including its alleged homophobic tendencies, is among Out of
Time's highlights.) In addition to those mentioned, the
other films that occupy a central position in the structure of
Out of Time are The Butterfly Effect
(dir. Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004), The Constant
Gardener (dir. Fernando Meirelles, 2005), 21
Grams (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003),
2046 (dir. Wong Karwai, 2004), Bakha
Satang/Peppermint Candy (dir. Lee Chang-dong, 1999), and
Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000).

The crux of McGowan's argument is that atemporal cinema is
a...

You must be logged in through an institution that subscribes to this journal or book to access the full text.

Shibboleth

Shibboleth authentication is only available to registered institutions.

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.